on this 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, hundreds of peace activists from across the nation are convening in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was built. Los Alamos is also the birthplace of the nation’s main nuclear weapons laboratory and the site of ongoing nuclear development. This afternoon, the peace activists will march up Trinity Drive toward the laboratory’s main entrance calling for nuclear disarmament.
Reverend James Lawson talking:
I was 17 years old. I was a junior in high school, getting ready to start my final year in Washington High School in Massillon, Ohio. I will never forget, because shortly after the bomb was dropped on the 6th of August, the National Forensic League changed its debate topic for schools across the country from whatever it was already designated to a new topic. And that topic went something like this: Does the atomic bomb make mass armies obsolete? Which meant, for us at Washington High School, an enormous amount of work of study, of research, of reading. So that was our debate topic from September until June of that ’45, ’46. So this is all planted pretty indelibly in my ears.
From the very beginning, there was, on the one side, the government’s attempt not to get full information available. So, from the very beginning, there was a conflict over how many people were actually killed, how many people were injured. From the very beginning, the issue of radiation of the GIs who moved in to occupy Hiroshima was controversial, and whether that radiation was dangerous. The pain and suffering of the entire city and it having been literally vanquished from the Earth, that issue was rarely talked about and was considered maybe classified, but our own government did not want to reveal the awesome character of the devastation.
Reverend John Dear talking:
we’re just continuing to try to build up the movement to call for the total abolition of nuclear weapons. And Los Alamos is the birthplace of the bomb, and business is booming, and so we’re going there to, in a spirit of nonviolence, invite the 20,000 employees who build the heart of every bomb, nuclear bomb, to quit their jobs and to call for the closing of Los Alamos.
As you know, two years ago, the United States Congress approved spending $1 trillion over the next three decades to upgrade our nuclear arsenal. This is insanity. And very few people are talking about it. Los Alamos has more millionaires per capita than any city in the country, the richest county in the country, sitting above the Santa Clara Pueblo, the second-poorest county in the country. You know, they continue to—they spend $2 billion a year building new bombs. President Obama is trying to upgrade the whole nuclear facility there, in effect building a state-of-the-art plutonium bomb factory.
What do you do? In solidarity with our people and our brothers and sisters in Japan, we’re going to march in silence, we’re going to sit in silence, we’re going to have a rally in the park on the physical spot where they actually built the Hiroshima bomb 70 years ago. We’ll do it again on Sunday with hundreds of people from across the country and, maybe most importantly, local New Mexicans. And we’re saying, you know, the place has to close, it’s a threat to the environment out here, it’s a waste of money, it’s not making us safe, and so forth and so on, trying to keep the movement alive and trying to build the movement. And meanwhile, we’re having the conference on nonviolence, as well.
two years ago we hosted a delegation of 25 hibakusha and their children. Imagine, they had never left Hiroshima, and they got off the plane and came into New Mexico, up—and we took them up to Los Alamos. And they wept and told us their stories. But they were also very moved to find out that ordinary Americans are calling for the abolition of nuclear weapons with them. And so there was hope there, I thought, as we befriended each other and continue to build connections, especially from Los Alamos and Santa Fe, in New Mexico, with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And this is our hope. We continue to build global solidarity, a global movement to abolish these weapons once and for all, and take that trillion dollars to end poverty, clean up the environment and fund nonviolent conflict resolution.
President Obama has said great things about the need to abolish nuclear weapons, but the practice is we continue to fund developing them and upgrading, at an enormous cost, where that money is needed for just basic human needs here in the United States. So, you know, this is the great problem we’re facing with our government right now. And the solution is, we need a new, stronger, grassroots movement in the United States, connected with the global movement, to say, “We need to start working for the abolition of nuclear weapons now.”
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James Lawson, civil rights icon and Holman United Methodist Church pastor emeritus. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. called him “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”
John Dear, longtime peace activist and the author of 30 books on peace and nonviolence, including The Nonviolent Life and Thomas Merton, Peacemaker. He is a lifelong anti-nuclear activist and has led peace vigils at Los Alamos for the last 12 years.
— source democracynow.org